My First Five Husbands (27 page)

“Mimi,” I said gently, “never in the history of the world has an elephant fallen through the ceiling on anyone. So don’t worry.”

She said, “Aunt Rue, this could be the first time.”

The kid had a point. I felt as if one had already fallen on me.

F
unerals are obscene. Looking at Mother in the casket at the funeral home—that strange, unrecognizable face, laid out in an ugly dress she had hated—this wasn’t my beautiful Mother! It was some clumsy wax effigy. Watching the casket being lowered into the earth—surreal! Impossible! In the limo on the way back home, I couldn’t control my grief. All the kids stared at me, embarrassed.

“Aunt Rue,” Mimi said, “there’s nothing to be sad about.”

Mimi had known Mother nine years. But at thirty-nine, I had lost my dearest friend, my most powerful ally, the woman who’d stood by me selflessly, helped raise Mark for fifteen years, the only person I could always depend on, who could make me laugh in a special way. I was astounded to see Mark so in control. My father was obviously shaken to his roots, remaining distant and silent. If anyone had depended on her more than I did, it was Bill. They had been married forty years. She was only sixty-one, he sixty-five. Way too soon.

In my childhood, when I was afraid, I’d say, “Mother, I don’t want you to ever die.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Eddi-Rue,” she’d always assure me. “I promise I’m going to live to be a hundred. My father’s aunt—my aunt Belle Haney—why, she lived to be a hundred thirteen!”

And now our little redheaded dynamo was gone.

Unable to stay in that Ardmore house, I drove to Denton, Texas, with Melinda and her kids. We picked up pecans in their yard at dusk, my panic raging, then had supper. Sheridan was out of town, so I crawled into Melinda’s bed with her, needing to talk, gripped in a paroxysm of grief. But characteristically in control, she went to sleep. I lay awake, reading one of her science books all night.

Thanksgiving day, I flew back to L.A. and walked into the dark, empty Palisades house at dusk. Lette and Linda were away for the holiday. Mark had stayed in Ardmore a few days. Not a soul in the place. As the desolate darkness swept over me, I picked up the phone and called the only pal I could think of.

“Bea?” I said unsteadily. “I’m back from Mother’s funeral, I’m alone, and—”

“You’re coming out to my house,” she said. “Right now. We’re just finishing dinner, and there are plenty of leftovers.”

When I arrived, there were maybe ten people around the table, including her mother, who lived with her and her husband and their boys. Bea made me a plate of food, then tucked me into bed in a guest room. Her tender, gentle care finally brought me peace, and I slept soundly.

The theme song played at the start of every episode of
The Golden Girls
was a little ditty called “Thank You for Being a Friend.” A bouncy little bit of bubblegum music. Hardly a tearjerker. But those words probably don’t get said enough. A friend in a moment of deepest need—that’s truly something to be grateful for.

I shall never forget Bea Arthur’s loving kindness that night.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

C
hristmas in Southern California. Rudolph the red-nosed coyote. Deck the Hills with plastic holly. Oh, what fun it is to ride in a Porsche Cabriolet. Baja humbug!

Yes, yes, I know the Christ Child story originated in a desert clime, so it makes sense cinematically, but I never got accustomed to all that damn sunshine. I want the schmaltzy all-American holiday magic with chestnuts roasting on an open fire. I want to go caroling and freeze my nose off, then come home and warm my cockles (whatever those are) with a big old mug of hot cider! I need that. That’s
Christmas
. Give me a Winter Wonderland. Brother, you can have all that sand.

Toole and I drove up into the mountains one day in December and happened upon a yucca stalk on the ground. It’s illegal in California to dig up yuccas, but this one was long dead. Lette and I made it into our Christmas tree. Somehow, it seemed appropriate. Tall, yellow, dead, leafless. We festooned it with decorations and composed a song: “Hang Your Balls On the Yucca Tree.” (After Christmas, I tied it to my car aerial with a big yellow bow, and I never had trouble spotting my Mazda in a parking lot.)

The
Maude
production schedule continued without catching a breath, but my grief took its time becoming bearable. Bill came out the week of Christmas, bringing with him a big, blond lady, who stayed a day or two before departing to visit relatives. She ran the Rod and Reel Motel that Bill owned in Arkansas, and I don’t know what else their relationship was. He said women had been coming out of the woodwork, and that Marie, who worked in Mother’s beauty parlor, was particularly making a play for him. I tried hard to create a somewhat cheerful Christmas for Mark and Bill, who said he still dialed their home number to talk to Mother, although he knew no one was there. Hearing him say that cut me to the quick.

Lette’s brother, Huntzie, had a ranch in the hills, and we drove out on Christmas Eve day to spend the afternoon with him and Lette’s parents, Bertha and Dickie. Lette did her best to lift my spirits, but this was not Christmas as I had ever known it. It was alien and wrong in that dusty, hot environment with people I didn’t know that well—or particularly like. Lette’s family was nothing like her. Dickie was a nebbish, Bertha loud and pushy, and Huntzie was a hotshot ladies’ man, always on the make. They spent the day watching football, while Lette and I wandered the scrubby hillside trails.

When I was a child, I had a recurring nightmare in which I slogged through knee-deep sand, watching my mother and father fly away in an airplane. Now, how many Freudians does it take to screw in
that
lightbulb? The meaning of the dream was obvious, and now that nightmare had come true. Wandering that arid, alien desert on that hot Christmas Day, Mother’s absence was almost intolerable. The bottom of my world had dropped out, and I fell through the hole into panic.
Grief
doesn’t describe it. Grief is painful, but it makes sense. Panic is a pervasive, unreasoning terror, and the dark heart of my panic had always been the fear of losing Mother. Being abandoned.

The reality of it gripped me in razor-sharp jaws.

Bill and I struggled through our first holiday without her, then he went home to Oklahoma and the throngs of widows vying for his attention. Still hale and hearty at sixty-five, he was bidding on jobs and building like crazy. He kept the beauty shop going, getting more and more entwined in Marie’s web. Bill loved the house he’d started building in 1946 and was still busily improving, planting, watching things grow. Mark continued to go to Ardmore during the summers, riding minibikes with his pals, comfortable in the house where he’d spent much of his childhood. But I had a hard time being there. The empty rooms screamed at me. If Bill was the soul of that place, Mother was the heart. And now the heart was gone out of it.

L
ooking back at it, The Hen House was similar to
The Golden Girls
. Lette, Linda, and I were three single women in our late thirties, one with a son living with her. Dorothy, Rose, and Blanche were three single women in their fifties and sixties, one with a mother living with her. However, while both routinely qualified as comedy, one was real life and one was pure fiction. All the women had conflicts, that’s true, but in Sitcom World, everything works out in thirty minutes minus commercials. The differences between Lette and Linda and me were harder to resolve.

We three little showbiz cutie-pies had our share of arguments and, after I got my Irish up, a couple of monumental fights. Perhaps our lifestyles were—how shall we say—a mite incompatible? Lette was neat to a fault, demanding that the kitchen be kept pristine, always on time with her rent payments and her part of the utilities. Linda was—how do I say this?—much less disciplined. This meant that I was in the middle—not sloppy, not superneat, but in between—so neither of them liked how I did things, and both kept coming to me with grievances.

One day Linda confronted me, furious because a package of cookies was missing from the pantry. I asked Mark, who said he’d eaten them, not realizing they were Linda’s. I replaced them, but she was still pissed off. Obviously, she really loved those cookies. Meanwhile, she was almost always late with her payments. I collected the rent and utilities and mailed them out, since the house was leased in my name. I was always bugging Linda for her tardy portion, but it didn’t lessen our friendship. She was just lackadaisical. And we had a lot of fun when things were going well, giving dinner parties galore.

Lette was hot and heavy with Jack, Linda dated various guys, and I kept seeing good old Toole. Mark was in love with his guitar and getting quite good. He and Lette kept playing music together, which helped improve his technique. She’d gotten a job as lounge pianist and singer at the Jolly Roger, a North Hollywood restaurant. Never one to disguise her feelings, Lette called it “the Jolly Cocksucker.” Many nights I went down to catch her act, that glorious soprano delivering both torch songs and comedy numbers with equal prowess.

“Never forget, Lette love, that you are singing for all of us who would give our eyeteeth to sound like that,” I kept reminding her.

Much of the time, her talent made me blubber. But the girl could not act to save her life. Of course, she wanted desperately to get into television, and I coached her, but she couldn’t interpret a script well enough to get a role on TV. Put her in a stage musical and she was fine, but in a nonsinging role she was lost. I drove to a dinner theatre near Disneyland to see her play Mammy Yokum in
Li’l Abner,
Agnes Gooch in
Mame,
and other leading comedy parts. Between these gigs, she played and sang at the Jolly You-Know-What. She and Jack were getting to be quite the ticket, but Jack, who was divorced with four teenagers, had no inclination to get married. She was frustrated—head over heels about him.

I, however, was becoming less and less head over heels about Toole. He was basically a laconic ex–apple farmer, not doing much to restore his burned-down house or improve his land. He was odd, offbeat, but not intellectual or artistic, and although he was sexy as could be in a plaid shirt and dungarees sort of way, I felt the need for more…stimulation. So to speak.

The Pacific Northwest was his stomping ground, and he wanted to take me on a car trip up the California coast. All the way to Eureka and back—in a week. Eureka is about seventy miles from the Oregon coast, so this would be one heck of a lot of driving. Everyone knows that a car trip—all that confinement—is a valuable litmus test for learning how two people get along, so when
Maude
shut down for its spring hiatus in March, we set off on our adventure, Toole driving so I could enjoy the gorgeous coastline.

Early on the first day, he started whistling “Tea for Two.” Not a classic “pucker up and blow” kind of whistle, but a thin sizzy whistle from between his teeth. And not the whole song, mind you, just the first two bars.

“Tea for two, two for tea, me for you, you for me
…
”

Between his teeth, you see. Over and over and over about nine jillion times.

“Do you know any other songs?” I tactfully inquired, nails digging into my palms.

“Nah, just that one,” he said, and smiled.

“Well, I’ll teach you another one!”

I whistled a few other short ditties, but he couldn’t repeat them. He had no sense of pitch, and by the end of the trip, I had no sense
whatsoever,
having been rendered brain-dead long before we got back to L.A. At that point, he could have whistled Mozart’s
Magic Flute
in its entirety, for all I cared. I just wanted to get the hell out of that car and shake loose of Mr. Bucolic.

But he was not so easy to shake loose. He kept calling from time to time but finally got the message, and I never saw him after that.

I
n May, the nine-month lease on The Hen House was up. Linda bought a place in the Hollywood Hills—a gorgeous four-story house that Lette dubbed “The Castle.” Linda asked Lette to move in as her tenant, but she didn’t invite me, Mark, and the menagerie. And we would have politely declined if she had. I loved them both to bits, but—grow up, kids!—
The Golden Girls
is a fantasy. Three grown women and a teenage boy are not likely to make good housemates for more than nine tempestuous months. Mark and I happily moved a few blocks up the street to sublet an adorable two-bedroom cottage. It was perfect for us and our little zoo, and Mark stayed with me for the summer, studying “on the street,” as he puts it, with an advanced guitarist friend and jamming with musician pals out in the patio laundry room.

One August day at dusk, I got up from a nap to take the garbage out. The laundry room had a wide sliding glass door that opened onto the patio, and on my way back in, I noticed the light on over the clothes dryer and thought,
Oh, that kid. He left the light on in the laundry room. And what’s more, didn’t close the door. Good grief!
and headed full steam across the brick patio, stepping down onto the short cement walk, meaning to stride headlong into the laundry room, but instead plunging headlong through the closed glass door in an earsplitting burst of shattering glass, and as I was falling, I thought,
Oh, my God, I’ve gone and killed myself!

I landed facedown with one foot impaled on the protruding shards at the bottom of the door and smaller fragments sticking out of me here and there. I felt blood pouring down my face from my forehead. Gingerly feeling around up there, I found a large V-shaped flap of skin hanging down to my eyebrows. I pushed the skin back up to my hairline and held it in place as best I could, carefully pulled my foot upward from the jagged scythe at the bottom of the door, extracted pieces from my hand, elbow, and knee, then limped across the patio, crying out,
“Mark! Mark! Call the paramedics!”

Trailing blood, I hobbled to the kitchen, grabbed dish towels, and made tourniquets for my right ankle and instep. Blood was pouring from the severed toes on my right foot. Sickened and faint, I pressed a cold wet rag to my forehead and called Norman Lear.